A Great MAC AAPM Summer Dinner Meeting

On Friday evening, June 22, the MAC AAPM met at the Barking Dog restaurant in Bethesda, MD to enjoy an excellent dinner, share in amicable conversation, and listen to Jim Deye discuss the future of medical physics from the NCI perspective.

The meeting was attended by 23 members who listened to Jim’s perspective on where our field was going. Jim started by reviewing NIH grant applications and awards for the past 17 years. He described the recently developed National Center for Advancing Translational Science and discussed the Medical Physics Laboratory of the Future, which was the focus of the Expanding Horizons in Medical Physics Workshop held in 2011. He shared the thoughts and insights from several leaders in our field, including Robert Jeraj, Soren Bentzen, Ted Graves, Jan-Jakob Sanke, Chuck Mistretta, Jim Zabzebsk, John Wong, and Rock Mackie. In December, 2008, the NCI decided to fund 12 Physical Science Oncology Centers, each to be given $2,000,000 over 5 years. Each center will investigate cancer from one of four perspectives: physics, evolution, biological information processing, or complex systems. Jim concluded by reminding everyone that the important thing was to put physics in medicine rather than medical in physics. A lively discussion followed the presentation.